When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty

When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. By Mark Rifkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. viii + 436 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $99.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

Mark Rifkin's When Did Indians Become Straight? is a thoughtful examination of the complicated landscape that lends itself to answering the question the title poses. Rifkin carefully and methodically scrutinizes the rhetoric of sttaightness within settler colonialism, highlights the intersection between Indigenous kinship models and conjugal couplehood, and problematizes subsequent nuclear/bourgeois homemaking as the dominant model for "family" within U.S. borders.

Rather than producing the obvious answer to the rhetorical question, "When did...